


through the walls our daughters cry

by maplemood



Category: Sicario (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Father-Daughter Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Morally Ambiguous Character, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, Reunions, Sign Language, Spoilers, Witness Protection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 15:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15173627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: It's seven years before she sees him again.(Or, Isabel gets better until she doesn't, and her relationship with Alejandro will never be anything but complicated.)





	through the walls our daughters cry

**Author's Note:**

> Not that I expected anything less, but holy crap, the ending of _Soldado_ destroyed me, and left me with a whole traumatizing boat load of unanswered questions, especially when it came to Isabel. She seems so broken in her last scene, and this fic is my attempt to explore that while also giving her the hope of a better ending. Plus more morally-questionable-dad!Alejandro feels, because DUH. 
> 
> (Also fills the abandonment issues square on my hc_bingo card.)

She has been Isabel for sixteen years and Carina for less than the span of two days. She is Rafaela, Rafaela Sophia Morena, for seven years before she sees him again.

Him, the dead man walking. _El abogado. El sicario._

Alejandro.

Seven years past the end of a life, in a state where the sky hangs heavy with rain and the wind smells of pine, not dust, she spots a dark car with tinted windows idling at the corner of her block. The same corner where, every weekday morning, kids wait for the wheezing orange lumber of their school bus, their high, chattering voices bright as confetti in the dim air. He waits, and her heart doesn’t know whether to lift or stop.

~

Rafaela: “God heals.”

Sophia: “Wisdom.”

She picks them without much thought forty-eight hours after touching down in Corpus Christi. Listens to Graver roll them off the tongue a time or two himself before he nods. “Yeah, at least it’s got a pretty sound to it.” He offers her a slick, sly smile with the twist of bitterness sunk in deep. “Best of luck, _chiquita.”_

Hanging between them, unspoken: _Don’t waste it._

She’s placed in a leafy, white-columned suburb in Virginia, about as far away from the border as you can get, with a woman she calls Mamá. She comes to mean it, too, but not before their first year together is up. The new names don’t fit her. They chafe and they bite. Seams dig in and split, leaving their angry red marks mapped across her body. Rafaela is picking at one of the scabbed-over cuts on her thigh when she hears him—smooth and curiously soft, one word of warning.

_Carina._

Flickering through her head, it drags his image along with it. All in black, gun and tactical vest, his face hidden behind his sunglasses and his thoughts hidden behind his face. He could hurt her as easily as help her. In the end, he’d done both. Is still doing both.

 _I gave my life for you,_ she imagines him saying, and whispers back, “I never asked you to.”

_Don’t waste it._

With shaking hands, she smooths her skirt back over her thighs.

~

God only knows how many minutes she wastes hesitating behind her door. One kidnapping, plus a fresh lifetime’s worth of betrayal, was all it took to turn Rafaela stingy; these days she pinches her hours like pennies, and those minutes? She’s never getting them back. That’s what finally convinces her to slip on her sandals (lace ups have been out of the question for about a month now) and step out onto the walkway. Like time, this chance is slipping through her fingers. Catch it now, or let it pass her by.

She walks towards the car carefully, one hand kneading the small of her back. It aches almost constantly now, no matter what she does with her posture or how much she grumbles, begs, and curses. For a moment, though, the pain migrates to the pit of her gut, anxious and seething. The driver’s side window rolls down. Rafaela’s breath snags in her throat.

The scars are smaller than she imagined, too small for the night she remembers. A dark dip sinks into his left cheek like a dimple; without a word he angles his face so she sees the identical mark on his right cheek. Exit and entry. Hardly noticeable after all. They suit him.

“Seven years.” Her voice, once she finds it, sounds less like Rafaela and more like Isabel. Isabel, who sits beneath this man’s skin, in his bones. Isabel, who stayed behind. With him. “I thought you forgot about me.”

He doesn’t reassure her, doesn’t say _I’d never forget you_ or murmur an excuse having to do with recovery, risks, regulations. He’s a liar, she knows this, but he’s never lied without cause. Not to her.

“I screamed and screamed. Did you hear?”

“I heard.” His voice: soft, curiously smooth. It slides between her ribs and stays there.

Rafaela’s free hand bunches into a fist. _“Seven years.”_

If she didn’t know better she’d swear—not an eyelid, not a muscle—something twitches in his face, some quickly-covered jerk of emotion she’s not meant to see. Alejandro taps a finger against the steering wheel. His eyes slide over her, taking in everything.

“You look well.” It’s not an apology and it’s not a peace offering. Rafaela doesn’t accept it as either. Still. Time’s slipping through her fingers.

“You look old,” she says, working a knuckle into her back. Too late, she wonders if bothering with the next part is even worth it. “Come inside.”

~

_Don’t waste it._

So: she doesn’t. For five years Rafaela works, and works hard. Powering through high school and summer jobs on stubbornness and spite alone, it feels like; she wasn’t much of a student back home, never needed a job of her own. In between closing shifts and twelfth-grade calculus, she pictures Alejandro—sometimes in black, sometimes stripped down to a farmer’s stained work shirt and a cowboy’s wide-brimmed hat, and no less inscrutable for it.

 _I can’t do it,_ she tells him. _I’m not smart enough. Not strong enough. You picked the wrong girl._

 _I picked you,_ he agrees. _You must do the rest._

In her dreams, Rafaela dips her head, again, to the sleeve of that shirt. Cheek against it, she breathes in sweat, soap, a last whiff of dust. She feels the warm bulk of his shoulder beneath it. She rests against him.

_Carina._

_Papá._

At eighteen, she heads to college for a degree, guts it through and graduates a year early. Summa cum laude. Sign language interpretation brings in steady work—soon after she’s rented her first apartment. Rafaela keeps succulents on her windowsills, coaxes the landlord into letting her paint the bedroom sunshine-yellow. She interprets in the schools, even earns a mention in the local paper. Three days after the article runs she gets a call from an unknown number.

“Nice work.” It’s the first time she’s heard Matt sound truly pleased. The first time he calls her, and the last time, too.

~

“I was going to make tea,” she says, trying and failing not to bristle at the way he eyes her cluttered kitchen table. “Do you drink tea?”

“Do you have coffee?” Now he’s moved on to her walls, plain eggshell but for a couple stains and blank but for two pictures. One shows her and Mamá right after Rafaela’s graduation, arm-in-arm on the college green. The other is thumbtacked next to it, an unframed sonogram.

“Instant.”

He turns back to her. “Then,” Alejandro says, “I’ll make instant.”

It’s tough, sharing her kitchen with another person, let alone this person. Rafaela points him to the coffee and the mugs, knowing the whole time he’s taking note of every chip, every stain. The dark circles under her eyes, the way her shirt, two sizes too big but not maternity, stretches tight across her stomach. He’s made it his job to create chaos, but at the end of the day Alejandro is a man of order. Clean lines, clean shots.

 _Well, I’m neither of those things,_ she almost says. _You made sure of that._

Instead, she squeezes past him on her way to the microwave, breathing in the sharp smell of aftershave and coming close, too close, to reaching for his arm, his shoulder. He’s alive. Despite everything, he held himself together, and he is alive, and in her kitchen now, and Rafaela could freeze where she stands and cry with gratitude. Which she doesn’t do. Of course. She’ll save the tears for later.

When he’s gone.

~

“Show me.”

“What?” Mild though it always is, his voice spells a warning. Isabel flinches away.

 _Estúpido._ Well. You made the bed, now you’d better lie in it. “Show me how you signed your name. _Por favor,”_ she adds. Arms folded. Stomach knotted.

For a moment, Alejandro doesn’t answer. He picks up the scissors from where she left them splayed wide on the concrete stoop, sliding the blades together with a _click._

Sweat prickles cold along the back of her neck. _“Señor—”_ Isabel starts, with no idea what she’ll say next. She’s fumbling her way to an apology when he slides the scissors into his shirt’s front pocket.

 _“Ven acá,”_ Alejandro says. _“La luz es mala.”_

~

The mug he picked is missing its handle and covered in sunflowers, of all things. Rafaela snagged it at a neighbor’s yard sale for five cents.

“You have a boyfriend?”

She shakes her head. “Shouldn’t you already know that?”

He ignores the question. “A husband?”

Rafaela waggles the bare fingers of her left hand. “Sit down.”

Her table came from the same yard sale, battered, scratched, and scribbled on by one too many kids. She hasn’t bothered repainting it, or finding real chairs to replace the cheap folding ones she already owns. Alejandro sits on one side, she sits on the other. She blows on her tea. He sips his coffee.

She meant what she said outside. He looks old. Looked old to her back then, too, the way every man over forty looked old, but she doesn’t remember gray threaded through his hair. His body’s gone softer, too, broadened out a little. Far less than most men can hope for; Alejandro’s fighting days aren’t behind him yet.

It’s obvious (or it should be), but Rafaela twitches at the cold stab that races up her spine as she realizes she looks older to him, too. Changed. And what does he think of those changes—her hair, still chopped short, her scarred arms, the tattoo splashed across her left shoulder? Are they just going to sit here, drinking in silence, never mentioning them, not saying a word that isn’t bare pleasantries? Why did he come here, then? Just to check up on her?

Yeah. She should be so lucky. Rafaela sets her mug down.

“You know,” she says, flickering her fingers from the table to the walls, “when I found out what really happened, I—”

He’s looking at her, the mug halfway to his lips. Waiting for her to finish, polite, patient as can be, but he had the way, she remembers, of stealing her words, of making her as quiet as him. She picks at a dent in the tabletop.

“Seven years,” Rafaela repeats. “Okay...it was five then. Five years. But everything I ever did, I did to make you proud, because you died to save me. _Everything.”_

Her nail catches on a splintered edge, rips. Rafaela hisses. She looks up, and Alejandro has put his mug down, but his face hasn’t changed.

 _God,_ she prays, suddenly, silently, _never let me become like him. Never let me be a stone._

“Just once,” she says. “All I needed. If you’d knocked on my door just once…”

She’s dreamed about this moment. Can’t pretend she hasn’t. Polished every word to a bright, sharp point, and now most of them have flown straight out of her head, cowed by the reality of him. Scrubbing her hands across her face, Rafaela blinks back the dampness in her eyes furiously, breathes it down, into the pit of her twisted gut, and holds it there. “Whatever,” she says, sharp and whining, a bratty teenager. “Why are you here? Why now?”

~

_Don’t waste it._

For a year, there’s nothing she doesn’t try to forget him. All she forgets, though, is what tipped her off: the exact moment a headline, a whisper, a rumor planted the seed in her mind. She’s kept an eye on the news from home—it is still her home, never mind that she’s a dead woman if she so much as steps across the border again. One night or another, the hints click together, black and white and sharp as newsprint in her mind.

Alejandro Gillick was dead. He isn’t any longer.

So, Rafaela loses her job. Comes in late a time too many, or maybe it’s the whiskey on her breath that does her in; no matter. What’s done is done. She lets her apartment fall to shambles around her, skips on a couple bills, and when Mamá starts to worry she runs and runs. Two states away. Three. Across the country.

He stole her, stole her life. He let her live all these years in the dark, believing...Rafaela doesn’t know what she believes anymore. He must have cared about her. He took a bullet to the face for her. That still counts for something, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

She dances. On a night or a morning, drunk halfway out of her mind, she spins from one wall of her latest squat to another, arms outstretched, the sound in her throat a low keening too watery for singing. She relives a memory that never happened. Her tiny feet planted on a pair of polished shoes, her tiny hands swallowed by a pair of large, dark ones. Spinning and spinning, pressed to the softness of his shirt. Spinning. All together now.

The man in her bed groans, rouses enough to ask her what the hell does she think she’s doing. Rafaela swirls one last time, collapsing on top of him with a sigh.

_“Mi padre. Él me enseñó a bailar.”_

_“Loca,”_ he grumbles, and shoves her off.

She chases a few leads. Gets nowhere, but then again her searching is half-hearted at best; she knows it’s useless to look when he doesn’t want to be found. She tries contacting Graver so she can at least bitch him out, _Motherfucker, you never told me_...Gets nowhere with that, too.

His hold on her, maybe that’s what she’s trying to escape with booze and razors and one-night stands. The fact that Alejandro could walk away, his own life unchanged, and hers in ruins behind him.

~

It’s old, torn along its creases, and speckled brown with dried blood at one corner. Alejandro pushes the photo across the table to her.

“He told me he kept it in his wallet.”

“Did he?” Rafaela’s hands tremble. She doesn’t touch it.

Implacable, Alejandro slides it even closer. “Every day after.”

It’s a picture she should remember. She doesn’t. Carlos Reyes, young and thin and hungry about the eyes, and the little girl, five or six, scooped in his arms. She grins up at Rafaela, all crooked teeth, butterfly-clipped curls, and rolls of puppy fat.

“Isabel,” she mumbles. The kid she hardly knows anymore. Rafaela scrapes her nail over a fleck of blood. “Did you kill him?”

As if he’ll answer, as if there’s any difference between starting a war and striking the killing blow. She knows her father’s sins. She knows Alejandro’s, she knows her own. She wishes all their better parts were enough to save them.

“I missed him,” she says. “Every day after.” She lifts her eyes, fixes them on his. “But I’d already missed him for so long. I never cried for him. Not the way I cried for you.”

The tears she promised herself he wouldn’t see well up from her gut too fast and too strong. And she’s held them in for so long—all seven years, it feels like, in this moment—she can’t find it in herself, the stubbornness or the spite to keep going. Rafaela makes a tiny, frustrated gurgle and clamps her fingers to her mouth.

“Are you enjoying this?” she snaps between them.

The flimsy chair creaks as Alejandro rises. He crosses to her side, closer and closer, until she and her chair are almost slotted between his legs. Until his immaculate shirtfront and the flap of his coat are all she sees. Rafaela clamps her mouth harder. The first sob bursts through sharp as a throat full of gravel, bows her shoulders, breaks her.

A blunt finger, still warm from gripping the mug, traces the marks along her shoulder. The idea Rafaela still doesn’t regret, though the execution is sloppy—the space she was in, she couldn’t exactly afford Washington’s finest in tattoo artistry. Lopsided, cartoonish hands sign a name across her skin.

“Carina.”

“One time,” she whispers. “Just one time, and I would have run into your arms, I would have been so happy…”

She can’t bury her face in his shirt. Her stomach won’t let her. Instead, she buries it in her own hands, the sobs that rock her so deep she almost doesn’t notice the warmth, the pressure when he cups a hand over the nape of her neck.

Alejandro speaks softly, forcing Rafaela to quiet down if she wants to hear. “With him, yes, I enjoyed it. With you?” A pause, a second’s consideration. “I didn’t expect to. I don’t.”

~

 _Isabel._ She signs it, fingers fumbling, tacky against each other with dried sweat and dirt and the stickiness from her dinner that she still hasn’t bothered to rinse off. What’s the point? It’s not like the blood will wash out of her memories any time soon. “Did I get it?”

“Not quite.” Alejandro shakes his head. “Watch again.”

They’re crowded so close under the weak light from Angel’s stoop that Isabel feels his breath stirring her clipped hair as she stares at his hands, eyes narrowed. Each letter itself is simple. A curl of the fingers, a shape traced through the air. He signs them too quickly, though. Expects her to catch up in a few seconds to what he’s been doing for years. She narrows her eyes. Tries again. And again.

When he finally says, “Good,” it’s like a cup of cold water in the desert.

I-S-A-B-E-L, she signs, grinning. Then, on impulse, A-L-E…

She stops, brain scrabbling back. “Wait, wait—”

-J-A-N-D-R-O, he finishes for her, then, with a move so practiced she doesn’t question it, brushes the stray clippings off the back of Isabel’s shirt. “Go inside,” he orders. “Get some rest.”

Months later, she wakes up sobbing, fist curled, thumb upraised. A. A-L-E—

 _“Papá,”_ she whispers, sleep-heavy, fumbling in the dark. “Alejandro.”

_Papá._

~

They say their goodbyes. After he’s hushed her and thumbed the tears off her cheeks, and after Rafaela has stood up, folded the photo and slid it into her pocket. She walks him to the door. Then they stand, caught in the doorway for too long.

He takes her wrist in his hand. Turns it delicately, as if it’s a baby bird or a bomb, runs his thumb over the scar slit across it.

“It’s healed,” she says, then immediately curses herself. Why should she reassure him? Let him wallow in the guilt a little, if he has any left. Which is doubtful, edging on impossible. “I needed the wake-up call,” she adds anyway. Why?

Alejandro drops her wrist. “The pain.” He gestures to the small of his back. “It’s here?”

“You noticed?” she asks flatly. A smile, watery as it is, twitches at the corner of her mouth. “Day and night, night and day. I can’t do anything about it.”

“Try massage,” he says, and if there was ever a combination of words Rafaela expected to hear straight from Alejandro Gillick’s mouth, that was not it. “My wife always needed someone to dig their thumbs in back there. She swore it helped.”

“I don’t have someone.” She relays the fact before wincing, realizing how much it sounds like a grasp for pity.

He stares past her, to the cheap furniture and empty walls. “Maybe you should find someone, then.”

“Maybe,” she agrees. Doesn’t say that, when it comes to solitude, she learned from the best. What would be the point? He already knows that. Rafaela tucks a stray tuft of hair behind her ear, bracing for the question she has to ask. “Will I see you again?”

She knows the answer. He knows she knows. “Pray that you don’t.”

 _“Sí,”_ she says. So small, so still. All she meant to say, all the fight, gone. There is nothing to say.  

“Rafaela.”

Seven years. His face blurred over time, but she never forgot his voice.

“I wish you the best,” Alejandro says. “A long and happy life.”

She kisses his cheek before he goes, and calls out to him as he’s about to get into the car, high and rushed and desperate. Isabel again. “Hey!”

He turns, the driver’s side door already between them.

 _Goodbye,_ Rafaela signs. She spells his name quickly, expertly, her hands trembling. A-L-E-J-A-N-D-R-O.

 _Goodbye,_ he signs back. _Rafaela._

She isn’t sure she can bear to watch him leave. She does it anyway, arms crossed, cupping each elbow, clenched as though by that alone she can hold herself together. She wonders if Alejandro knows how completely he stole Carlos Reyes’ only daughter. Did he relish that in her father’s last moments, take his time rubbing it in?

_Papá._

Wrists bandaged, head murky as a river. _Carina,_ she heard, a constant echo scraping away at her conscience. And answering like it wasn’t his lies she’d built her life on, _Papá, Papá._ Rafaela wondered, for the first time, if Alejandro believed her to be the stronger person. If all these years, he’d never shown his face because his faith in her was stronger than her faith in herself.

A kingpin’s daughter. A man with a dead wife and a baby dissolved in a vat of acid. What choice did they have, when it came to endings? Yes, she could have said so much more. He should have said so much more. Yet she has to be grateful with what she got. What was offered.

It isn’t enough.

Tough shit. It’s all she has.

Rafaela tugs her father’s photo from her pocket. Lifting it to the light, she says, “Maybe you’ll come out looking just like her. What do you think, Carina?”

The kick jolts from her very root, hard as a punch, soft as a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> 1.) Title from "Mothers of the Disappeared" by U2.
> 
> 2.) I took one semester's worth of ASL in high school, so I'm about as far from an expert as you can get; I do know, though, that Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and ASL aren't the same, so for the purposes of this fic, let's just assume that Isabel/Rafaela eventually learned both. (Oh, and yeah, sign language tattoos are a thing.)
> 
> 3.) All Spanish translations courtesy of Google--I did try to get them right, but if anything sounds hokey, that's why. 
> 
> 4.) The translations: 
> 
> _abogado:_ lawyer  
>  _sicario:_ hitman  
>  _Ven acá, la luz es mala.:_ Come here, the light is bad.  
>  _Mi padre. Él me enseñó a bailar.:_ My father. He taught me how to dance.  
>  _Loca:_ Crazy.
> 
> 5.) As always, you can find me on [ tumblr](https://mapleymood.tumblr.com/) and [ dreamwidth](https://maplemood.dreamwidth.org//)\--comments are much-loved and always appreciated!


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